A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  No moon, though it’s still almost full, so it had set or not risen yet, leaving the sky to all the great dropping stars and one low drift of still cloud over Queenscliff. Rods of light dipping in the bay. The lighthouse with its head in the stars, its top spinning red, white, red, had Orion over one shoulder (and Aldebaran). The steps were in darkness, lumpy with sand, the rails wet, the beach all in shadow and starlight, only dimly reddened in patches where light fell from the pair of tide lanterns, both with their three red rods alight, perched one above the other on balconies under the main lantern. Black shoals sank groping into the surf; from time to time a thunder growl came out of the west. Under the pier the shallow lamplight barely moved, and a star, a red or white glitter of mirrored lighthouse in a pool.

  The bay was so still that the only sound was a trickle of waves, a warm clammy breeze, one surprised chirp out of a mass of dark seaweed. Frog calls carried all the way from the swamp, and they are such an enclosed sound too, those chirps and hiccups and small deep bells, as if they were made in one great bubble. Bolobble bolobble. Bonk. I picked my way by the shapes of shadows between rocks, over sand. On this inner beach the cliff hides the lighthouse until you reach the metal staircase, when you see its mask rise up in the distance and open and close slowly – once, twice – two round yellow eyes.

  William Hart-Smith, from ‘Lighthouses’:

  A lighthouse stands and looks at the sea.

  If I tap it on the shoulder

  it doesn’t turn round.

  Today is sunny! I lay reading too long – Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals – in my old black bikini beside the little fig tree. (It has twenty leaves now, patterned with the shadows of other leaves and the solid shapes of other ones touching them, blocking the sun. An Escher fig tree.) Now I’m scorched all over, because of not wanting to stop and go inside. Alone here, but today I’m replete – golden inside with sleep and sun and apricots and luxuriant sorrow. Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young…Her face is on the cover: the Anne Estelle Rice portrait – or the black-eyed Japanese-bobbed head-and-shoulders bit of it – and the square-yoked dress is tomato, or pomegranate, but never persimmon. If it stayed too long in the sun and faded, well yes, maybe then…(On the cover of The Aloe in the Virago edition the dress is bright cherry, and the background stewed cherry.) The dress is poppy red and frail, and what am I missing, never ever wearing a dress to flaunt in the sun…? They were at Looe on the Cornwall coast in May to July 1918, gorging on sun and strawberries. And on Boxing Day in 1920 she wrote to Anne Estelle Rice from Menton:

  I salute you in tangerines and the curved petals of roses-thé and the crocus colour of the sea and in the moonlight on the poire sauvage.

  A story: ‘The Black Ships’: from Walt Whitman – ‘City of ships! / (O the black ships! O the fierce ships…)’ – the time fractured, two (three?) distinct periods intersecting. The past. A silent ship. Rere regardant.

  The past, her past before they met (in the kitchens at Mount Buffalo Chalet): the nights at North Wharf, bike rides to Appleton Dock to take time exposures of the dripping lights, the ships. He is Greek. He came on the Patris. In Melbourne now, they go to Station Pier whenever a ship is leaving; one day they will be the ones on board. They see the film Never on Sunday and he teaches her the original Greek theme-song, the heroine’s love-song to the port of Piraeus by night, and to the boys of Piraeus.

  In the present (1960s): they are at the name-day party of a friend of his from Greece. (She is meeting his friends one by one – has none of her own.) Being a professional cook, he has agreed to do the catering, with help from her – not Greek dishes for once but something new that he hopes they’ll like, something different – Chicken Maryland. (Some of the guests are querulous about this apostasy, some see her as the force behind it.) After the meal the men all in one room roar and jeer, clapping – one is doing a striptease on the table top – the women can hear it all in the saloni while they mind the children and make patient conversation about families. (Her inadequate Greek.)

  After dark the friend whose name-day it is gives them a lift back into the city, where they are going to a Greek film in the Melbourne Town Hall. On the way through Footscray she interrupts the men’s talk to say, ‘Oh look! There’s the turn-off to where I used to go on my bike! Appleton Dock!’ She had told him about Appleton Dock before, but now in the silence he turns on her a grey face of outraged rebuke, a murderous face. Awkwardly, the drive continues in silence.

  At the Town Hall – where as a schoolgirl she heard David Oistrakh play, and Victoria de los Angeles sing Canto a Sevilla – the film is a grainy black-and-white inaudible farce. Not far into it he grabs her arm and pulls her out into the street. He won’t say where they are going. In a dark coffee shop he unleashes a stream of abuse, the gist being that she has proclaimed herself to his friend as a whore – who but a hore goes to the docks alone? – while she sits numb, unable to swallow the coffee, wooden in her own defence.

  She is in the black wool jersey dress she made herself, with the long-stemmed scarlet and gold hibiscus embroidered on it in satin stitch.

  I went to take photos. I told you. You’ve seen those photos! Why didn’t you just say that?

  Oh, yairs, he believe thet, you think…

  His last distraught shot: If I staying with you, do I hev to losing all my friends?

  Silence. Perhaps she overhears what lamp-shadowed people at nearby tables are saying. They walk to the station. In the train back to their suburb (he rents a room in a Greek household in the house opposite her parents’ house) they are shaken, nauseated by the violence of their anger, the magnitude of their estrangement, looking away from each other and from the shuddering reflections their eyes meet in the dusty panes. Alone in her room at her parents’ house (which is where they furtively, hurriedly fuck now and then, having nowhere else) she puts Canto a Sevilla on the gramophone, with the volume low because the walls are thin. The sepulchral first flute passage – she picks up Ulysses and reads:

  He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

  Rere regardant, she says aloud, the lush soprano voice soaring now over hers.

  (Or it could be that she puts on the record of the mirologi she is teaching herself to sing, a traditional song of mourning from Ipiros, sung over the corpse by old women, professionals: called on like midwives to attend the dead. On the record one contralto voice, Dora Stratou’s, sings:

  San ilios eva – san ilios evasilepses

  Kai sa fengari ehathis

  Kai san kloni va – kai san kloni vasiliko

  Marathis

  Paidaki mou.

  Like the sun you have set

  Like the moon you are lost

  And like a sprig of basil

  You have withered

  My little child

  Hollow and nasal, the long notes of the mirologi waver. Mira, moira, means fate. At moments an instrument gongs in.)

  She has a map he drew for her of the village along its river, the family houses labelled with names, and the school, the church; and a photo of him leading the black horse, Marko, through a field of flowers – poppies, chamomile? (A black-and-white photo.) Both are creased; she sleeps with them under her pillow.

  There is a story in it, if only another mirror story. To work, it might need to be a comedy of misunderstandings: wry switches and juxtapositions of points of view (what Mavis Gallant does in ‘Luc and His Father’ in Overhead in a Balloon).

  Chris’s aunt, his father’s only sister, died alone this year in her stone house on the hill overlooking the village at Yerakona, and was found rotting in her black clothes. She had an affliction: moon-sickness, seleniasmos – epilepsy’s folk name (the full moon brings on attacks); and a greed, for photos, any photos of the family, to put up on her wall.

  I carry home stiff black rags of seaweed
for the garden, and tassels of bubble weed, hollow blond grapeskins to lay on the fox-pelt of the pine needles with the curls of the lemon gum bark, a triple incense. Under the lighthouse a boy from the children’s camp called out, ‘Do you like seaweed?’ I said it was good for the garden and he nodded: it keeps the sand cool for the roots.

  At the hotel until after midnight last night: the candle burning near us in a thick glass vase the size of a brandy barrel was a mound of creamy lace by then. Not just a few hours but days ago, it seemed, the black garden window was a wall of green light beside us.

  For me 1987 has been (to take stock) the year (or another of the years) of living blindfoldedly; the year of performing the shadow play, the year of looking for meanings, like some old kafedzou peering at the dregs of other people’s cups. I may be a slow learner, but what a good shadow I seem to have made.

  How much longer can I go on living in this solitude in this house built on sand?

  I hardly slept. At about sunrise I woke and gave myself five orgasms. After the first one, as happens often now, I melted into hot tears: this slow trickle across my cheeks down into my ears was so like a tongue, two tongues, that the lust kept welling up again and was exhausted by the end rather than assuaged. This deep wound between my legs: why does it still refuse to stay closed? – dry lips sealed in the husk of hair.

  I bought myself a Buddha at last, after the long Lama Tsong Khapa puja in Melbourne the other night (soft chanting, candles in the dark wind): a small slender coppery Buddha with a secret smile, sitting back in the lotus position with one hand under his bowl of nectar and the fingertips of the other hand touching the earth. The base is engraved with lotus petals – a single row, not the double row which symbolises the mirror image in the water. He is quite heavy, though he is hollow: upside down, inside out, the statue is a mouth or a bell-skirt; the hole boring into the head is a throat, a vagina. When the red candle is lit, a large long-eared Buddha shadow flickers over the gold planks of the wall.

  Peter Matthiessen, in The Snow Leopard, on the ‘body of profound intuitive knowledge that antedates all known religions of man’s history’:

  It stirs me that this primordial intuition has been perpetuated by voice and act across countless horizons and for centuries on end, illuminating the dream-life of primitives, the early Indo-European civilisations of the Sumerians and Hittites, the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, guarded by hidden cults in the Dark ages, emerging in Christian, Hasidic, and Muslim mysticism (Sufism) as well as in all the splendorous religions of the East. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

  Last night was a turbulent high tide, no sand, just the sea wall glinting wet. The great pine in the curve of the bay – a landmark shown on navigation charts – is a cone of red lights for Christmas, with a gold star.

  ‘Among Pigeons’ has come out in print. I added a paragraph to ‘Goldfish’ today, something that belongs in it. It’s what I felt was still missing: she leaves their bed and walks on the shore at night alone.

  New moon this cold night. TV reports keep coming from Macquarie Island. Yesterday at midnight on the flood tide they tried to float the Nella Dan off the rocks, having patched up the hole in her hull and pumped the water out of her, but all they managed to do was turn her round. Tonight they have to succeed or wait a month for another tide high enough.

  First light, the first birds. The lovers sleep in each other’s arms. I sleep alone. A ship’s throbbing in the Rip, like a cat’s purring, woke me.

  H’s trees are heavy with small red pears, nectarines, almonds in suede cases. His two black-brown cats are lying intertwined, one darker, one lighter, each with an eye showing. Princes of darkness. They make the Tao symbol, Yin-Yang: simple happiness. Sufficient happiness.

  In the middle of the night I stole a furtive glance.

  The two ingredients were in affable embrace.

  Their attitude was most unexpected,

  They were locked together in the posture of man and wife,

  Intertwined as dragons, coil on coil.

  Po-Chu-i (Translation by Arthur Waley)

  The Nella Dan is free! On her way to Denmark, they say. Tonight at 8:46 is the Summer Solstice. Every day here has been ice-bright with a fierce wind off the sea, but the red buds on the oleanders (those tough Greek bushes, poison-bushes) have been opening up their peach-fleshed ruffles.

  A Christmas card from Kalamata: ‘There is no olive harvest this year, because of the late snow in March…’

  At Carlton two more pot plants have been stolen, this time from the backyard: an ivy and a red geranium.

  The grey cement wall under the cranes is higher now than the two-storey restaurant round the corner. (From my yard I see walls on all sides now – only, through a gap, the black shape on the sky of one of the squatting stone kangaroo gargoyles on the restaurant roof.)

  Tullamarine airport is a desolate place to be on Christmas Eve – cleaners, a handful of people waiting half asleep for late planes, television sets in all the lighted departure lounges switched on to spruikers and choirs, Carols by Candlelight. The bedraggled midnight parade of luggage around the carousel in a flat glare of light.

  (Are you the new person drawn toward me?

  To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;

  Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

  Do you think it is easy to have me become your lover?…

  Walt Whitman: Calamus)

  Christmas day, and the beach under the lighthouse awash under drizzle and spray; a hissing southerly tossed sand and water in the grey air all along the surf beach. No one was there, and no birds – two gulls wheeled out to sea.

  At the boat harbour in Queenscliff where we sat on the sun-sodden wood with our legs over the edge, a moored boat behind us nudged, jolted the jetty. Slivers of whitebait showed white, green – des aiguillettes – underneath the whirlpools of light breaking on the piles. The last lines of ‘Marine’ in Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations: ‘les fûts de la jetée, / Dont l’angle est heurté par des tourbillons de lumière.’

  The Buddhist masters are always saying that being human is more precious, a higher incarnation, than being an animal. We humans know more. What do we know? Death. Am I superior to the cats, the whitebait and the mutton birds, and am I better off, for knowing death? If science were to force or graft this knowledge into animal brains (assuming, as we do assume, that they lack it), what would we then be giving them that made up for what we had taken away?

  Boxing Day, grey haze in the morning, then sultry sun. A salt smell in these dim rooms. And rancour, veiled with affable punctiliousness: swollen with wine at evening; still there at morning.

  The morning papers had the story of how the Nella Dan sank. Once they floated her they knew she was holed worse than they thought, was in fact beyond salvage. Before they could finish stripping her and scuttle her, she listed; so they towed her out to sea, where she exploded in a tower of flame, ‘like a Persian Gulf oil rig’, one report said, and burned wildly all day, a Viking funeral ship, sinking stern-first at evening. The Age’s headline:

  Nella Dan goes out in blaze of Viking glory

  And the reporter began by quoting Dylan Thomas – Old age should burn and rave at close of day…

  He has three pieces of jewellery from Tibet: two bracelets, and a necklace of tiny irregular glossy pearls, and coral, and black-laced turquoise, the strands strung through two engraved rods carved out of yak bone. The bracelets are heavy silver, engraved, with their translucent stones set in holes in the silver, not on it – so that you look through an amethyst, a ruby, at a garden broken into countless tiny facets, as a fly might see it.

  At high tide in the afternoon, with the beach shrunk in under the cliff, he cleared a space for us to lie do
wn in the sand. He tossed away a piece of brown broken glass, a detergent bottle, a glassy plastic bag like a jellyfish, half sand-swamped (turtles, mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, swallow them in the oceans, and die). He was about to close his hand over a puffed dead porcupine fish when he realised and sprang back in horror. I hadn’t noticed what it was, half-buried in the sand; but he was not quite sure of that, I saw. We lay flat on our towels, red eyelids closed to the sun, and had nothing to say.

  Flushed, he refused to talk. I went in to work on my book review. Alone in the sun he drank white wine, brooding. After dinner came the attack. He left first thing in the morning. (‘I spit on your mentality.’) When he looks back on these two days, the porcupine fish will stand for me in his mind. A puffed-up skin, long spines over a hollow vault – half-buried in the sand. And when I…? A bull ant rampant, rage-red.

  Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?

  A, looking with me at the book of the Family of Man Exhibition – we had been to see it together, though we were at odds already by then, and wandered in a tight mirror-maze of images of people and their shadows – Look, she said. Behold, this dreamer cometh: that’s what I think when I see you.

  ‘If wanting to be what I am is dreaming, then I want to be a dreamer.’ Peter Handke: The Left-Handed Woman

  I remember A saying once (it was a line from a song, she said): I am myself, my own fever and pain. And another time, another song: It’s easier to die by water.

  I took a calendar of Tibetan tankas round this grey morning to E’s house in the tea-tree. E has lived alone here for years; she is in her mid-seventies now. We went and sat beside her stiff tapa curtains in the window shaded by a fig with a great grey elephant-trunk, a green umbrella of leaves and large soft green pouches that the birds will eat; the demon in her swirling tanka followed us with bulging eyes made of deep glass. (Her fig, she said, is twenty years old: will I see my Black Genoa become a great green umbrella?) She has tree ferns and a tall gingko (or ginkgo) with leaves that are fan-striped like seaweed, not branched, with fine veins – scalloped leaves, two-leafed-clovers. In the centre of the garden is a glass studio with the washed-up bones and shells she collects sun-blanching on the sills; sea-urchins; three seahorses riding on a stone.